Boeing? Ya Gotta Be Kidding

The Artemis II mission has been moved back again.

They keep postponing in by thirty days.

The whole thing is surprising: suddenly after donnie showed up again, with Epstein breathing down his neck, what had been an aspirational-only sort of "someday, sometime" project became "we are going in February" sort of mission.

Not surprisingly, "February" has become "later, probably March".

Since "whatever is wrong with things" required transporting the skyscraping rocket back into the barn, "March" is probably early.

Transporting that thing across the ground takes a lot of time.

March is probably about as soon as it's going to be back in the barn.

Unless they want to shoot the thing through the roof - possible since Boeing is in charge - they are going to need to crawl it back out to roof-free Florida to try to launch it.

Sometime.

Probably not March.

"Try" is a scary word to me, at least when it applies to the lives of four brave human beings who are willing to sit on the tip of what is, in the best of all worlds, a bomb, and pray for "liftoff".

 "Try" becomes an even more ominously fatal prediction when it is used in relation to the company that, back in 2019, wanted to stay the order from the FAA grounding its deathtrap Max 8 and instead, "collect more data"; two crashes killing everyone on board wasn't enough data; they wanted to see if the Max 8 kept crashing.

So, with Boeing in charge of a big piece of Artemus II, what has been the hold-up?

Artemis II is not failing because of one big flaw.

It’s the accumulation of:

• recurring leaks

• shifting safety thresholds

• communication failures

• unexplained anomalies

• heat‑shield uncertainty

• suit concerns

• schedule pressure

Sounds like a situation needing more data, so let's "shoot 'em up there," says Boeing.

I have never felt worse, or more afraid, about a published thing that the United States is going to do.

donnie is going to attack Iran over breakfast someday soon and I can't do anything about it, but, on the other hand, I don't have a dog in that hunt.

It's just donnie being donnie and I'm sure Karolynne Levitt is going to have a good rationale.

Mike Johnson is tight with her, so Congress must be on board.

But for our astronauts, I am afraid.

I'm afraid because a great Seattle company - a company of engineers and perfectionists - got taken over by a shareholder value tribe of bullshit artists from St Louis, and people are dying and will continue to die, because those people - the ones who are dying and will die - think Boeing is still Boeing, not Proctor and Gamble trying to be spacemen.

Link to 2019